The Easel

23rd March 2021

Awarding the Prtizker to a team synonymous with refurbs marks an important shift in architectural vales

Phineas Harper | Dezeen | 17th March 2021

All too often, architecture seems to reward the new, the flamboyant. This year’s Pritzker Prize – the profession’s highest honour – has instead gone to a firm that emphasises re-use of neglected buildings. Their mantra is “never demolish … always add, transform, and reuse!” Said the jury, their work “renews the legacy of modernism, but they have also proposed an adjusted definition of the very profession of architecture.” Images of 10 key projects are here.

16th March 2021

Jules Olitski in New York

Karen Wilkin | The New Criterion | 15th January 2021

Olitzky absorbed from his Abstract Expressionist predecessors not the dramatic expressive gesture but the power of colour. He launched into colour-driven abstraction, showing a colour sense that “walks a tightrope between the ravishing and the vaguely disturbing.” What gives these works a feeling of prescience is that their wonky cellular and blobby shapes signalled that Pop was just around the corner.

The Frick Madison

Jason Rosenfeld | The Brooklyn Rail | 1st March 2021

New York’s Frick Collection is famously housed in the mansion Frick lived in. Forced to relocate by a renovation, do its treasures look different in a modern gallery setting? The Vermeers, now hung together, have quite different relative merits. With improved lighting, the Bellini is more obviously a masterpiece. Smaller details “pop” without the clutter of Frick’s furniture. Mostly, the art is better without the “complicating aura of its Gilded Age robber baron of a founder”.

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